Coax Reborn in Home Entertainment Networking

LAS VEGAS--With a cable jack in almost every home, a group of industry heavyweights believes coaxial cable to be the natural choice to wire the digital home of the future.

Wednesday afternoon, the founding members of the recently announced Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA), held a panel discussion here describing how they will bring home networking over coax to market.

"MoCA will specify a multimedia technology allowing customer choice of where to receive their high quality content, and will give service providers greater reach in the home, more efficient installations and increased value of their offerings," said Mark Francisco, director of engineering for home services for Comcast New Media Development.

The founders of the new alliance include Cisco Systems, Comcast, EchoStar, Entropic Communications, Matsushita Electric (Panasonic), Motorola, RadioShack, and Toshiba. The list contains at least one representative from each part of the service chain, from service provider to retailer to silicon manufacturer.

However, since the member list is restricted to the eight powerhouse companies, audience members at the panel discussion raised concerns that MoCA seems to lack the openness to debate that characterizes similar ventures at organizations like IEEE. David Kummer, senior vice president of engineering and systems at EchoStar, replied that the consortium was starting with an already established technology. "We're trying to fast-track [it]," he said.
There's nothing special about this wire," added Vincent Izzo, director of business development for Motorola's Broadband Communications Sector. "Most homeowners have split their own cable, through walls, and run it through the house. Consumers understand it. And it's not that expensive for the splitters and the wire to do it."

With members like RadioShack as part of the alliance, the retail arm is already spoken for. "We sell a whole bunch of coax," quipped Pete Griffin, counsel for RadioShack, known for its collection of utilitarian widgets.

The coax network is designed to serve as the media backbone for the rest of home but allowing the final few feet to be owned by other types of networks, such as wireless, if the consumer desires.

"We're not anti-wireless, wireless has a position, but we want MoCA to be a backbone," said Kummer. "You can use wireless to extend [the network] out to your patio."

Griffin also noted that RadioShack doesn't see coax as the only possible solution. "We see a synergism of all of the network technologies," he said. "We see the MoCA piece as being a very, very important piece."

David Benham, senior manager, New Market and Technologies Development at Cisco Systems, pointed out that with MoCA it would be possible for his son to purchase a movie from Video-on-Demand and stream it to his bedroom. Parents, however, could monitor the video selection via the picture-in-picture function of his family room TV. In essence, the video would be streamed to two different locations seamlessly, Benham said.

As with other IP-based networks, each device must have its own IP address. Unfortunately for consumers, this means that they either have to buy new devices or buy network adapters for their legacy appliances. "The dream is to get everything integrated," Kummer said. However, he acknowledged that "we will need adapters to make legacy devices work."

Once a device has an IP address and is on the network, the media should be distributed seamlessly. The panel admitted that their plans are not yet fleshed out, but Izzo suggested that there may be an "uber-box" that would receive content, such as a media server, that would service the rest of the clients in the house. The obvious challenge for MoCA is to deliver a coax network but keep it simple enough for the average homeowner to understand. Francisco agreed, explaining that the only way to win in the digital home market is to "give the customers greater choice of how they move around their content. We're trying to decide the best fabric on how to do that."

Izzo quipped that MoCA is helping consumers "make the jump from plug-n-pray to plug-n-play".

As a backbone for home networking, MoCA is directly competing with the HomePlug and HomePNA which advocate similar strategies but favor the use of electrical outlets and phonelines, respectively. In some cases, membership in two or more groups is made by the same company in an effort to hedge their bets. According to Francisco, Comcast is currently in advance testing for a multi-room PVR system using HomePNA, but as that strategy requires the consumer to string new wires, he doesn't believe it's the final solution. He affirmed that the next phase is to move into a "no new wires" strategy, stating his allegiance to MoCA by stating "And that's why we're here today